Transcript
Charlie Kirk (0:00)
Hey, everybody. Here's a speech I gave in Albuquerque about atheism being the fastest growing religion in America. If you want to support us, go to charliekirk.comsupport and email us your questions freedomarliekirk.com make sure you come and see us in person. Tpusa.com Jenfree we are going to Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, Nashville with Candace Owens, Vegas and San Jose. We want to see you there. Space is running thin. Tpusa.com genfree email us your questions freedomarliekirk.com Buckle up, everybody.
Steve Smotherman (0:29)
Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
Candace Owens (0:41)
I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy, his spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point usa.
Steve Smotherman (0:51)
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here.
Charlie Kirk (1:03)
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Steve Smotherman (1:33)
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Charlie Kirk (1:36)
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Steve Smotherman (2:09)
would you please help me welcome Charlie Kirk to Legacy Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico? Thank you. Thank you guys. See our Turning Point USA students here how you guys doing? It is great to be with you. Now, I was warned about this service. I'm told this is the highest energy service so could be. You know, we've had some fun. And the cool thing is some of you might say, oh, I've heard this before. I really do my best to try when I speak multiple times throughout a weekend, to make every speech a little bit different and a lot different in certain ways. But there are things I'm going to repeat because repetition is the soul of memory. And there are some things we must commit to memory. The first of which, how great is it to be in person with each other in a church? You have a great pastor here and a great leader here. Steve is passing the test of what it means to be a courageous Christian in a time of crisis. If you're like me, you've been looking around the landscape, and we have seen so many Christians and pastors in a passive position right now. They have been slow to open, if at all slow to challenge tyranny. We're going to talk a lot about tyranny and what it means and what I've seen from afar. And this is why I saw Steve at a conference about a month ago, and he said, I know you're scheduled to come here in July, which I will be back in July. And I. And Steve said, I want to know if you can come here quicker. And I said, absolutely. So I sent the first available date that I had. I said, I'll fly out to Albuquerque. We'll have a lot of fun. And that's why I'm here. I'm here for a couple reasons. First of all, I want to give whatever voice God has given me and given turning point behind courageous people, because courage is so rare. And Steve Smotherman and the whole team around him, by the way, what an unbelievable staff. And your church deserves to be supported right now. Truly, moral courage is lacking right now in America. And there's the protesters out there. Do you notice how angry they are? I thought they're in charge of everything. They control the Senate, the House, the presidency, yet they're angrier than we are. It's really amazing. We'll get into. There's actually a biblical reason for that. But I could tell you from traveling the country and seeing how different churches have handled different circumstances, some people have totally failed the test. Your pastor has passed the test. But what is the test? What is that test? Well, the Bible speaks clearly about that. You see in Matthew and then in James and all throughout the New Testament. Talks about the promise of persecution. So we don't talk about that a lot. A lot of churches, they do the promise of eternal life, which we do. We are promised that the promise of coming in relationship with our creator through Jesus. But Jesus also talks about the promise of persecution. It's not even a question. It's not like this might happen. That, you know, if it happens. Here's a how to manual. And do you know what we're supposed to do when we're persecuted? We're supposed to celebrate Rosa, say this is evidence that we're doing the right thing. That so when we have protesters outside, the public health officials, the governor coming after us, this is confirmation that we are right where God wants us. And I have a rule. If you are in the culture, if you are getting all the nice articles written in the New York Times, if you're getting all the A list celebrities to say nice things about you, you're probably not doing something right in the church. So I want to talk about this, and I didn't zero in on this in the previous services, but what is a church? It's such a simple question, isn't it? But an unbelievably complicated answer. Is a church a TED Talk with a rock concert? That's kind of what it feels like in most churches, right? I'm going to give you five points on how to improve your life. A lot of lights and music. By the way, your worship here is incredible. Your worship team is. And I don't say that lightly because I've gone, I've been to a couple churches where it's like, whoa, God bless you. Intent did not materialize into the result. But we, God looks at the heart. So God bless them. No, I mean that you guys have wonderful heart and amazing fruit. I really mean that. The music here is spectacular. But is that what the church is? It's a TED Talk with the rock concert. Is the church about making you feel good? What a church is? It's such a simple question, but in some ways we can't answer it. So let's go back to what the Bible says. Jesus at Caesarea Philippi famously said, who do you say I am? Later on he asks and he commands on this rock, build mine. And we use the English word for church. It's not that simple. So when Tyndale translated the Bible from Greek to English, everything changed. So prior to that, the Bible was in Latin. And I know that there's a lot of Catholic brothers and sisters here, and this is by no means a slight at the Catholic Church, there's some of my dearest friends are Catholic. My mother was raised Catholic. My grandmother was the most Catholic person I think in North America. Seriously, it was ewtn. It was Mass every day. And she was a phenomenal person. And I know that she accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior. I know there's a lot of Catholics in this area too. And so I'm not going to get into the theological differences here, but I am going to pinpoint one thing that I think the Catholic Church was incorrect on theologically. So the Catholic Church said the church is centered in Rome. One leader, one hierarchy. You must go through our infrastructure to get to the, get to the Creator. I think that's a fair way to describe especially how it worked in the 14th and 15th hundreds. Tyndale changed everything. This guy was a rabble rouser. It's like, yeah, what did the scriptures actually say? Because, you know, Latin was not, well, was what not widespread. Less than half of 1% of the population of Europe actually spoke Latin. So you had a bunch of people that were unable to access the Scriptures, the perfect word of God. And so he wanted to democratize the Bible. He wanted more people to read the Bible. So he went and he did the very difficult scholarly work to translate the Bible from Greek, of which most of the scriptures are written into English. Now we all speak English. You're hearing me in English. English was the language of the peasants. It's the language of the common man. Most people who spoke English in the Scottish Highlands, which are originally my people and our people, that's why we always love a good fight is they didn't, they were not. English was not a respected language. So Tyndale goes in and he says, whoa, Jesus didn't say church. It's a filler word. He, it was a Greek word called ekklesia. What is that? So ecclesia was actually something very, very specific. Jesus said, on this rock build my ecclesia. So if you do a little bit of research on what that is, what is a church in Ecclesia, the word that our scriptures tell us that Christ used. He spoke Aramaic, it was translated to Greek. The best fit word. Not synagogue, it's not temple said it was this word ecclesia. Ea was a political gathering in ancient Greece. And Ea was a place where citizens came and fasted and prayed unified and met about the welfare of the town and the city that they were in to try and strive for two words. I, I, the more Greek that I learn, which is very little the more I have appreciation for how brilliant our founders were for incorporating these words and what they meant and how foolish our current leaders are. I really mean that. And so around two words, Ella, Utheria and isonomia, freedom and equality. So Jesus said, on this rock, go build my Ecclesia. On this rock, go have a gathering of people that care about the welfare of the city that they're in, that is active, that is engaged, that is aware, that is loving, compassionate. But also that is taking terrain. You see, in American Christianity, we have this false belief of compartmentalized Christianity. Like our influence stops right here at the wall. You know, at the walls. We can't really do too much government is for other people. We're just gonna. We're just gonna save people and then our responsibility stops. That is not what Jesus said. Jesus wanted comprehensive Christianity. He wanted to send people in all spheres of influence, in media and pop culture and arts and yes, government, politics. And yet we have been hypnotized in the broader American church, where they say we only talk about the gospel. Well, so do we. It's the good news. The gospel is really simple. God created you, we rebelled, we're broken. We need Jesus, we accept him. We get eternal life, creation, fall, redemption, recreation. It's pretty simple. And yet the good news needs to be spread in every single sphere of influence. What's preventing that? In the last 100 years, secular ideas have been more successful than Christian ideas. It's very difficult to say and admit secular ideas activists are more evangelistic than most Christians. It's tough to hear that, right? It's true. Atheism is the fastest growing religion in America. And atheism is a religion. Atheism is a declaration that there is no God. Now, there might be some atheists here. God bless you for being here. Get it. I have a couple comments on atheism, and I mean this. First of all, without God, there would be no atheists. Secondly, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. My good Frank Turek talks about this often. He has a whole podcast around it. I think it takes more faith to believe that everything we're living through is an act of randomness. The more you study science and actual science, not the stuff that Dr. Anthony Fauci, who by the way, should be fired immediately, immediately talks about, or your governor. And yes, I will get to her in a second. I will, I promise. That's the only through line of every one of my speeches. Is the tyrant running the state. It's true. Because her tyranny is worth challenging. The more you study science, the more that you go into the inquiry of the natural world, the more you realize that that there were laws that were set up, called natural laws. Where is natural laws mentioned in the Declaration of Independence? Our founders knew this. The laws of nature and nature's God. They knew that God set up nature in a certain way. For example, the laws of gravity, the second law of thermodynamics, the inevitable law of decay. Force equals mass times acceleration. An object at rest will stay at rest, equal and opposite reaction. We know those as Newtonian physics. God set up those parameters, and the Bible is consistent with the laws of nature. The more that we go to discover the scientific world, the complexity of DNA, the more that we map the human genome, the more honest scientists are blown away by the splendor and the wonder that only an omniscient, omnipotent creator could have put that together. Only if you believe that this was just a roll of dice, basically the right combination at the craps table, you have infinitely more faith than we Christians do. Infinitely. And I mean that that gap of faith where now science tells us the universe had a start, that there was a moment when it began. Well, therefore, using Aristotelian logic, if something started, there must be a starter. And that starter we call the Creator or God. Therefore, I believe that, and I mean this lovingly to atheists that watch, and we have a lot of atheists that support our podcast. And I think that there are a lot of honest atheists. My one piece of advice is call yourself an agnostic, not an atheist. An atheist is you screaming up to the heavens saying, you're not there. An agnostic comes from the Greek word agnosis without knowledge says, I don't know. And saying, I don't know is okay. In fact, that is the first step towards knowing God is saying, I don't know. I want to learn. Atheism is a wall, it's a shield, saying, I got all the answers. You see, I figured it out. There's nothing up there. Takes a lot of pride to believe in something like that. So being an agnostic is perfectly understandable. It's okay. And we should reach out with tenderness to those people because there's a creator that wants to get to know them. The third thing about atheism, this all ties together is the intention. I ask this question frequently, and you should do this too, to the atheists in your life, which is, do you hope you're wrong? Do you hope that there's a God? And if the answer is no. I hope there's no God. What a depressing way to look at the world. You don't see your loved ones. You can. You can never come in contact with the Creator. There is no ultimate justice. There's no mercy, there's no grace. We're just a bunch of cells. There's no beauty, there's no truth, there's no romance. We're all just under this hypnotic trick of an act of randomness. And when you die, it's dust. What a depressing way to look at the world. Wouldn't it be a better way to look at the world? At least a more hopeful way to look at the world? Which is why when atheist says, yes, I hope I'm wrong, I have tons of respect for them. At least they're on. They want to. They want to be proven that there's a creator. Then I say, okay, good. You actually do believe that certain music can speak to you. Worship literally is the closest that you can come to the romance or to kissing your creator, if it goes back to the actual word worship. That's why there's. The longest book of the Bible is dedicated to songs, psalms. It's how you can get best in touch with the supernatural at times. When you look at beauty, what is beauty? That which is perfected in being. You go to Yosemite national park, you're, wow, even an atheist is blown away. There's something that speaks to your soul at that moment, right? It's more than just logic and reason, of which I'm a huge fan of. Don't get me wrong, my whole movement is built on logic and reason. But there's something deeper beyond just our ability to think rationally, which I think we don't do enough of in our society where it speaks to everyone. And music and beauty and art is how you communicate with that, which is why we have such miserable people in this country. Because the music that we're publishing and the art we're producing is so antithetical to what it actually means to pursue beauty. Music that glorifies the distance from God, a lifestyle, a culture that is self indulgent, not appreciating the Creator. It's why when you hear this worship music, you're all of a sudden saying, I'm not even understanding all the words, but it's speaking to me.
